People are panicking about AI, yet racing to adopt it anyway. Fear of the robot apocalypse may be real, but it’s abstract and hard to prepare for. Believing AI will make your job worse is concrete, actionable and supported by changes brought about by previous tech revolutions. New tech has often benefited companies more than employees and led to more mundane work, time in the office and even existential dread. No wonder people are learning AI to keep jobs they expect to get worse. I may be contrarian, but I think this tech revolution could be good for both companies and workers.
The PC sped things up by shifting who did the work. The secretarial pool was eliminated because people typed their own memos and created their own presentations. The internet enabled email. Reaching customers and colleagues got faster and the post office and interoffice mail stopped being bottlenecks. Smartphones and laptops added 24/7 access from anywhere, raising velocity again and turning dens into home offices long before the pandemic. Prior to the PC, email and the smartphone, your job was to make 10 widgets a week; by 2015 you were supposed to make 20.
Increased access and speed led to more work. Companies thrived while employees worked harder. Expectations outstripped tech improvements. Your email response didn’t write itself and the customer quote didn’t come together without your input. The promise of AI is different: it speeds things up, but it also does some of the work, including the net-new work that comes from everything moving faster. Your agent can draft a reply and even send a quote while you’re at the beach.
So far, the signs are somewhat discouraging. AI is making work more intense and not just for early adopters who are curious about it. People are expected to absorb tasks they once handed off since role boundaries are blurring. But we’re in the reorganization phase. Adopting significant new technology takes time and predictably causes turmoil and depresses output before paying off. This is a pattern economists call the productivity J-curve. The real question is whether, when the AI time savings finally arrives, we reclaim it or reflexively fill it with more of the same. I believe people will soon be encouraged to think and collaborate with the time saved.
When I’m stuck on a problem, I walk the dog, go for a run or hop on my bike, and I almost always come back with progress, sometimes even a solution. Maybe moving shakes an idea loose? I’m not unique: a Stanford study found that walking makes people more creative, even walking on a treadmill. But dealing with email often chains people to their desks.
My best ideas have come when talking to someone with a different perspective. Again, it’s not just me. Bell Labs built its famous lab around a long corridor designed so people from different disciplines crossed paths regularly. MIT’s Thomas Allen found that communication between coworkers falls off sharply beyond a few dozen feet. Open-plan offices chase that proximity, but people “crushing their goals” don’t get coffee with colleagues, and no one likes to be shushed.
McKinsey expects AI to give knowledge workers back about 30% of their day by 2030. That’s roughly 2.5 hours. Automating 30% of the time spent on work won’t make 30% of roles redundant, since people aren’t fungible. And I don’t expect good companies to cut that fraction of positions. Instead, some firms will ask people to spend those hours making more widgets, but outside of commodities or markets with unmet demand, doing so just floods the market, drives prices down, and leaves you running to stand still. The alternative is improving quality, and at least one prior technology advancement has already set off a quality boom.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1990s, people feared printshops would close and whole categories of work would vanish as everyone made their own newsletters and wedding invitations. But unlike the PC, email and the smartphone, it didn’t accelerate the pace of work. Instead, those new tools raised the quality bar. People tried making their own newsletters with images and clip art, fancy fonts and color, but realized they looked like ransom notes. Making a good newsletter isn’t just about tools. It requires skill and taste. Some rote jobs were indeed eliminated and few typesetters are left but demand for skilled graphic artists rose sharply. AI is similar. An agent may be able to write at lightspeed in the voice of a well-known author, but that’s only part of the job. Even if writing well and quickly is commoditized, you still need great taste to choose a subject that will fascinate readers.
Improving quality starts with skill but taste requires creativity and collaboration, and 2.5 hours a day can fuel a lot of it. Some ideas will strike on a solo walk. Others will arise during an unplanned conversation. Those strolls and serendipitous chats might bring some purpose and community back to the AI-powered offices of the late 2020s. Desktop publishing proved a tech advance can pay off for workers and companies alike. AI is poised to prove it across the whole economy. Even if it doesn’t, I’ll settle for better muffler shop ads on the radio.